On this edition of Your American Story Radio, we bring 2013 to a close, as Raja talks with a pair of local leaders, one from the business realm, and one from the political sector, who both have interesting stories to share, ones from which you will learn and be inspired.

-For many males who hit his 40′s and 50′s (if not sooner), “mid-life” crisis sets in, and the behavior that can result can be anywhere from extreme physical activity to the purchase of a dream car that the man has always had his eyes on.  For Upper St. Clair attorney Mark Dudash, a nostalgist at heart, he had already “been there, done that” with the car thing, having purchased and maintained a fire engine red Corvette, but he wanted something bigger (and NOT something with a souped-up engine…).  In 2010, Mark traded in his car to take the gamble of a lifetime, by embarking on a mission to revive Duquesne Beer, a beer that long been a PIttsburgh institution, but one that had been dormant for decades.  So far, the results have been sensational, with the new/old brew having not only rekindled a flame for longtime beer drinkers, but also having found a new market with younger patrons as well.  Mark talks with Raja about his story, why he decided to revive Duquesne Beer, and what lies ahead for the company.

-When we last checked in with Tom Baker, the leadership expert and executive with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Pittsburgh was embroiled in a heated political contest for a seat on the Allegheny County Council with Incumbent Matt Drozd in the run-up to the primary election.  Baker, having successfully vanquished Drozd in the primaries, and later, defeating his opponents in the general election to claim that seat, now looks ahead to 2014, a year that will bring widespread change to the region in terms of political leadership, with Baker positioned firmly in the thick of things.  Tom talks with Raja about his plans for Council, and the importance of being an effective leader, not only in the community, but on the homefront as well.

Rob Cochran (#1 Cochran Automotive)

SHOW APPEARANCE: EPISODE 42

Rob Cochran sits atop Western Pennsylvania’s most successful private dealer group.  But when it comes to running the enterprise that bears his name, there’s not much sitting involved.  President and chief executive officer since 1992, Rob directs all facets of the organization’s operations.  His presence is ubiquitous.  From boardroom to showrooms, in communities and on TV, Rob drives the company with energetic leadership, spirit and vision.

Rob joined the family business as executive vice president in 1987 after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with degrees in Applied Mathematics and Industrial Management.  Five years later, he became head of the organization.

Under Rob’s direction, #1 Cochran has expanded to include 14 new-vehicle franchises at 12 showrooms throughout Metropolitan Pittsburgh.  He has positioned #1 Cochran among the top fifteen privately held businesses in Western Pennsylvania.

Throughout his career, Rob has been recognized for his entrepreneurial passion and industry leadership.  Most notably, Rob has received General Motors’ highest honor, “The Jack Smith Leadership Award,” every year since its inception in 2001.  He has also received TIME Magazine’s “Quality Dealer of the Year Award,” and was a finalist for Ernst & Young’s “Entrepreneur of the Year”.

Rob serves on the Executive Committee and Board of Directors of the Pennsylvania Automotive Association and is active on the boards of Family House, Cancer Caring Center, Junior Achievement of Western Pennsylvania and the Pittsburgh Public Theater.  Personally and through the company, Rob supports more than 30 charities.

Rob and his wife Christina reside in Indiana Township with their five children.

Happy holidays from Raja and the staff of Your American Story Radio!

On this Sunday’s edition of Your American Story Radio, we feature an unprecedented FOUR never-before-heard interviews with business and thought leaders, as we head into the holiday season.  These are stories geared towards educating you about the most prevalent trends in business and the economy, and to inspire you to achieve success in your own endeavors, be they personal or professional.

-When the U.S. first entered their recent economic downturn five years ago, one of the industries that was front and center on the business page was the auto industry, as government bailouts and “cash for clunkers” programs ruled the day.  But what of the industry since then?  How has the industry recovered, both on a national scale and as it trickles down to individual dealerships, and what lies ahead for the future?  To help answer these and other questions, Raja enlists the help of Rob Cochran, CEO of #1 Cochran, the largest dealership in Western Pennsylvania, who discusses the story of the rise of the family business, how the auto industry emerged from its dire state, the strategies he employed to steer the dealership through rough economic waters, and what lies ahead for the auto industry.

-ALung Technologies CEO Pete DeComo is an award-winning entrepreneur who has been heralded as one of the region’s most prominent health industry entrepreneurs.  The longtime health industry professional first made his entrepreneurial mark in the Pittsburgh health sector as the founder and CEO of Renal Solutions, a company that specialized in the production of a dialysis technology system that was, quite literally, a lifesaver for patients who were suffering from kidney failure.  After Renal Solutions was purchased in 2007, Pete then moved on to his current company, ALung Technologies, the developer of a game-changing artificial lung for patients who are battling respiratory failure.  Pete talks with Raja about his remarkable entrepreneurial career as the head of companies that provide lifelines for two critical parts of the human body, and what he thinks about the impact of the Affordable Care Act, as well as other government regulations, are having on entrepreneurial endeavors in the health sector.

-Plus, Raja checks in with Mark Uchida of A ReMARKable Kitchen Store, who discusses the changes and trends that are affecting his business on a daily business, and the considerations a homeowner must make when it comes time to install a new kitchen or bath.

-Recently, we featured a discussion with Alan Robertson of the Pittsburgh Business Times, who discussed the changing role of “traditional” print journalism in the face of a revolution caused by the emergence of social media and the internet. (You can hear that interview, and all of our past interviews, here.)   Paul Gillin, a Boston-based media industry expert takes the discussion one step further, noting that social media is here to stay, and you’re best suited to hop onboard the train, or get left in the dust!  Paul talks with Raja about the impact that social media has on our lives, both now and in the future, and offers advice on what you need to do right now to adapt to the sweeping changes that it is causing for the way we live our lives.

Raul Valdes-Perez (Vivisimo)

SHOW APPEARANCE: EPISODE 3 

Raul Valdes-Perez is an entrepreneur and com-puter scientist. Currently he is owner of Advice is for Winners, LLC which he organized to pub-lish a forthcoming book Advice is for Winners: How to Seek, Get, and Use Advice. Raul co-founded Vivisimo Inc. in June 2000 and served as its CEO and Chairman for nine years until recruiting a new leadership team in June 2009. He then served as Executive Chairman until Vivisimo’s acquisition by IBM in May 2012. In the company’s early days, he raised National Science Foundation grants totaling nearly $1M and $500,000 from Inno-vation Works (a Pennsylvania state investment agency), launched Vivisimo to consistent double-digit revenue growth, profitable quarters, and prominence as an enterprise search company (Leader on the Gart-ner Magic Quadrant) without ever raising equity investment up through the acquisition.

Raul’s entrepreneurial contributions have been acknowledged with these awards:

Top Ten Reader Favorite for Entrepreneur of the Year by Inc. magazine

CEO of the year finalist (twice: ‘06 & ‘07) by the Pittsburgh Technology Council

100 Most Important Hispanics in Business and Technology by Hispanic Engineer mag-azine (3 consecutive years)

CEO Communicator of the Year (for-profit) by the Public Relations Society of America (Pittsburgh Chapter)

Outstanding Alumni Career Achievement, UIC College of Engineering, 2006

Carnegie Science Center Information Tech-nology Award for Excellence, 2006

Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year E-commerce, North Central Area, 2007

Citizen of the Year, 2007, Squirrel Hill Ur-ban Coalition

Before starting Vivisimo, Raul was a faculty member (research) from 1991 through 2000 at Carnegie Mellon’s computer science department, where he remains an Adjunct Associate Profes-sor. His research on new methods and applica-tions of knowledge discovery led to publishing 50 scholarly journal articles and book chapters in natural, social, and computer science, such as in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Brain and Language, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Organometallics, Physical Review E, Anthropo-logical Linguistics, and Communications of the ACM. He saw Vivisimo as a continuation of his work on making knowledge workers – whether scientists or not – more productive at finding patterns and new knowledge from data and text.

Raul has been a Principal Investigator on seven grants from the National Science Foundation, served on its advisory committee for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences, and was an action editor of the journal Ma-chine Learning. Representing Vivísimo, he has spoken at the Wharton Technology Conference, Search Engine Strategies, KM World & Intranets, FOSE, Busi-ness4Site, and many others dis-cussing search technology and its future, and he represented Vivisimo at the White House’s Jobs summit in Dec 2009, hosted by President Obama. He is on the Board of Di-rectors of the Pittsburgh Technology Council and the Pittsburgh World Affairs Council, and the Advisory Board of Safaba Translation Solutions.

Raul received a computer science Ph.D. at Car-negie Mellon in 1991 with a thesis on “Machine Discovery of Chemical Reaction Pathways” ad-vised by Herbert A. Simon (Nobel Laureate in Economics, 1978). He spent 1984-86 as a Re-search Scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in Randy Davis’s expert-systems group, and 1983-84 as a software engineer at Itau Tecnologia in Sao Paulo, Brazil, designing and implementing a Logo interpreter in Z80 assem-bly language for a 64kB RAM machine. He graduated with a B.S. (1980) and M.S. (1982) in information engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He holds one patent in search technology.

Raul was born in Havana, Cuba and attended school in Chicago and its suburbs. He has stud-ied or worked in Spain, Brazil, and China and is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese. He lives with his family in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighbor-hood.

Jake Haulk (Allegheny Institute For Public Policy)

SHOW APPEARANCE: EPISODE 2 

Jake received his Ph.D. and M.A. in economics from Duke University and a B.S. in chemical engineering from N.C. State. Experience includes chemical process engineering, teaching at the university level, senior business economist with the Federal Reserve, head of regional research at Mellon Bank, research consultant, research director and managing director of the Allegheny Institute. Dr. Haulk is the author of many reports on issues affecting Western Pennsylvania’s economy as well as analysis of the role and value of the nation’s inland waterways system.

Varol Ablak (Vocelli Pizza)

SHOW APPEARANCE: EPISODE 2 

Varol Ablak, along with his father, Hayri Ablak, and brother, Seckin Ablak, opened the very first Vocelli Pizza location (then known as Pizza Outlet) in 1988, employing a home-delivery system that, at the time, was not as popular as it is today.  Since that time, the franchise has grown to over 130 locations (and counting) throughout the country, hiring over 2,500 employees and serving over 10 million pizzas per year.

In 2003, Vocelli Pizza was named the fourth fastest-growing pizza company in the country, and has been recognized as one of the “Hot 100″ pizza franchises by Pizza Today, a trade magazine.

RICK SACCONE (PENNSYLVANIA STATE REPRESENTATIVE)

SHOW APPEARANCE: EPISODE 1 

Dr. Rick Saccone was elected to serve the people of Washington and Allegheny counties in November 2010.

He served our county for more than a decade as a United States Air Force Counterintelligence and Special Agent conducting felony, criminal, fraud and counterintelligence investigations and operations worldwide.

After retiring from the USAF, Dr. Saccone remained in South Korea to work as a TV news anchor and later moved on to work in international business for several corporations operating in South Korea and Central America. He later became a representative for an international organization implementing the Agreed Framework with North Korea. As the only American citizen living in North Korea during this time, Rick gained invaluable diplomatic experience working and successfully negotiating with international officials to build nuclear power plants.

Returning to the U.S to complete his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh, Rick became a full-time professor at Saint Vincent College teaching Political Science, Government, International Business and other international courses.

When America went to war with Iraq, Rick volunteered for an assignment to the U.S. Army as a civilian. He served in Baghdad and in the hotspot of Mosul as a Senior Counterintelligence Agent responsible for identifying, capturing and interrogating insurgents.

After returning to the United States and Saint Vincent College, Dr. Saccone embarked on a Fulbright-Hayes summer scholarship to Egypt studying Islam, history and politics, and, most recently, an education and research scholarship to Africa.

Rick has traveled to 69 countries; contributed numerous articles on international politics, business and culture to top national and international newspapers such as USA Today, the Baltimore Sun and the Korea Times; and authored seven books on North and South Korea and one on Iraq. His ninth book was released in 2013 and chronicles the faith convictions of our nation’s founders and how they understood the relationship of God and government.

Rick resides in Elizabeth Township with his wife, Yong.They are the proud parents of two sons, Nick and Matthew.

ROGER BYFORD (BLUE TREE CAPITAL GROUP)

SHOW APPEARANCE : EPISODE 1  

Roger Byford Co-Founded and was Chief Technology Officer of Vocollect, Inc., the world leader in voice solutions for mobile workers. Mr. Byford’s career spans more than 20 years in the industrial application of voice technologies.

Since the company’s inception in 1987, Mr. Byford has held numerous roles in the company, including Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer. He also led the company’s effort to broaden its market beyond the supply chain, and was the first President of Vocollect Healthcare Systems, the Vocollect business unit that is bringing the benefit of voice to the long-term care industry.

Prior to joining Vocollect, he was a member of the senior management team at Westinghouse Voice Systems, which was known for pioneering work in voice technology applications. He also worked for Westinghouse’s corporate Research and Development Center, where he collaborated to develop a voice-based access control system for apartment building elevators. Mr. Byford holds one United Kingdom and six U.S. patents, and earned his M.A. degree in Electrical Engineering from Cambridge University.

Raja explores alternatives to “traditional” collegiate education, as he talks with Dennis Wilke, President of Rosedale Technical Institute.  Dennis discusses the role that Rosedale, and other trade schools, play in bridging the gap between high-school education and “real world” job opportunities in many professional sectors not addressed by many four-year college and university programs.

Pennsylvania Congressman Tim Murphy checks in to the show to discuss his own inspirational story, provide an update on the initiatives he is working on in Washington to ensure that the business climate is operating as efficiently as possible, and offer his thoughts on the controversial Affordable Care Act.